Night and Day
by Ralph E. Silvering
Summary: Thomas loves two women, as different as night and day, and he fears that all of them are doomed. Thomas' thoughts throughout his relationship with both Lucille and Edith.


**Disclaimer: I just saw** _ **Crimson Peak**_ **, and it was so awesome I had to see it again. And maybe I'm just a blind idiot, but I totally just thought the Sharpes were vampires or undead-murderers, but not incestuous and murderous (but alive) siblings. The reveal of their relationship was as much a surprise to Edith as it was to me, although we had very different reactions to it (mine was all, omg all my dreams have come true). And by the end of the movie I totally shipped Thomas with both Edith and Lucille. So, there you go. Also, it really did remind me of a Bronte sisters, House of Usher story, and afterwards I found out that was the point. So yay, 1 point to me. But also -1 point for failing to spot incest-subtext (until it wasn't subtext anymore lol). I own nothing from** _ **Crimson Peak**_ **. If you don't like the pairing of Thomas/Lucille – or Thomas/Edith for that matter – please don't read. Ye have been warned.**

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Night and Day

When Thomas Sharpe turned 18-years-old, and legally an adult, he boarded the train from Eton to London. It had been a day of pouring rain, and his friends had asked him a million times why he was leaving on his birthday to go to London.

But he had to save her. And he could do it now.

He'd walked through that rain, soaked to the bone, hands clenched, and rapped on the door of Bedlam House. "I'm here to take my sister," he told the Warden, when the fat man with the piggy little eyes finally walked into the filthy waiting room.

"And you are?" the man had sneered.

He had raised his chin, aware that he towered over this man after his last growth spurt. "I am Sir Thomas Sharpe, and I demand that you release my sister, Lucille, at once."

They brought her out, dressed in filthy rags, with her beautiful, long, black hair shorn off. There were scars in her skull where they had drilled in an attempt to cure her, and she was patently and tragically malnourished. Yet she yanked away from her jailers as soon as she saw him, those beautiful blue eyes of her lighting up, as she took a few, tottering steps towards him.

"Thomas," she whispered, and he caught her to him before her legs could give out.

She smiled at that. "You're so tall now, a man grown," she whispered. His sister had always had perfect diction, and the cut-glass tones of her voice were soothing to him. He had missed her with a constant ache every day they had been apart. His eyes fluttered closed as she rested one white hand on his cheek. "And so handsome. My little Thomas."

He buried his face in her neck and felt her arms come up around him to hold him close. And, strangely, Sir Thomas Sharpe, Baronet, on his way to Oxford next term on a scholarship for mathematics and classical architecture, felt safe. He had come to rescue his sister, but he knew that nothing could scare him, nothing could hurt him anymore while he was in her arms.

"Let's leave, Lucille," he told her, feeling her pulse fluttering under his lips. "Let's leave this place, just you and I."

And they did.

He took her back to Crimson Peak in secret, telling Finley and the townspeople that the Lady Lucille had gotten sick at her Swiss boarding school, and that she had come home to get well. He dropped out of Eton, and forgot about Oxford, because his sister needed him.

The screaming was bad, the violent nightmares she had, and the days when she didn't recognize him. She would rant and rail and cry and beg, and Thomas wanted to go back to that house of horrors, and kill every single person in there who had hurt his sister; they had broken her even more than their parents had.

But gradually, Lucille's hair grew back, and she walked swiftly again, and the house, although falling apart, seemed to make her stronger. He seemed to make her stronger too, and as he watched her sleep, pushing her dark hair out of her face, he felt at peace.

He had never felt at peace while at school. He had spent all of it knowing that something was missing, knowing that Lucille was missing, and feeling afraid; afraid that they would kill her in that asylum, afraid that someone would know, just by looking at him, that he couldn't live without his sister; that they would know about the dreams he had of her as he grew older, the secret desires; that they would know how she had let him touch her that last year, before their mother…died.

"We have to do something about the house," Lucille told him one day, and he knew that she was better. "We'll have to let the remaining servants go. I'll try and invest what money we have, but we'll have to sell most of the property." She took a deep breath, calm, cool and collected, her fingers tapping gently on the surface of the kitchen table. "But that does not matter. The house is all that matters. As long as we have the house, we'll be fine." She had taken to wearing their mother's house keys on a ring at her waist, and they jingled as she moved gracefully about the kitchen.

"And me?" he asked her. "What should I do?"

"You should have gone to Oxford," she told him, her voice like ice. "There would have been a position for you in Parliament, or something. Some connection could have been made. Now we have nothing."

He rose up out of his chair too fast, sending it crashing to the floor behind him. In two strides he was around the table and standing before him. She gave him a cool look. "You don't really mean that," he told her. Begged. "I couldn't leave you."

"You never could," she agreed. "And now neither of us can leave."

"I don't want to leave. I don't want to be where you are not." He tried to reach out to her, but she took a quick step back, watching him carefully, cautiously, as though testing something out in her own mind. And then she took one quick step forward, her cool, pale hands reaching up around the back of his neck, drawing his face to hers.

When her lips met his it felt like….

Thomas has no words. He just knew that he needed this, needed her, had always needed her. She was beautiful, so very beautiful, and strong. He pulled her roughly forward, flush against him, feeling the long, elegant lines of her body. Her fingers carded through his curls, pulling none too gently and moving his head sideways, and he moaned at the little sparks of pain that shot from his scalp, and the rush of pleasure that swept through his body, as her lips brushed the side of his neck. Her other hand dropped down, undoing the laces at his trousers.

"Lucille," he groaned, trying to think past the pounding of his own heart and the rush of blood south as her hand wrapped around him. He was hot and throbbing, and he thrust helplessly against her. "Lucille!" he gasped. "Someone will see!" But then he moaned as she flicked her finger over the head of his cock, and he fell boneless, leaning into her, too far gone to protest anything at all.

She was humming that tune she'd always sung to him when they were children.

He'd done this a million times, biting into his sleeve to mask his groans, as he'd thought of her, the curve of her white neck, the fall of her dark hair, the smile she gave only to him. She was smiling now, Thomas could feel it as he brought his fingers up to trace her lips, his head still buried in the crook of her neck.

"Let them," she said, as haughty as only she could get. "Let them all see."

And he came in her hand.

He had watched her sleep a hundred times since coming back to Crimson Peak, but had always eventually returned to the Master Bedroom; the room where their parents had slept. Tonight he followed Lucille back to her room, and watched while she took a bath and combed out her long hair.

And then she came to him, curling into his arms and pulling him tight around her. She guided him the first time, and when he was buried deep inside her, her breathy moans on his ear, her fingers digging into his back, he felt alive; alive and whole and as if nothing could hurt him ever again. This is where he wanted to be, with her, always.

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Edith Cushing was small and slender, with bright blonde hair, and a proclivity for wearing yellow. She had narrow, wire-rimmed glasses and an earnest expression. And Thomas Sharpe had been infatuated from the first moment he saw her.

She was a writer, and her words had caught is attention first. There was a wry, almost musical, cadence to the way she wrote. It was as if she saw life as a song, as something that could be both beautiful and dark, but that she chose to see the humor in both light and darkness; she chose to believe that you could always choose to leave the darkness and return to the light.

She was practical, and walked with short, stubborn strides, and had no accomplishments besides an ability to accurately read people; well, accurately read everyone save him and his sister.

Or maybe she just refused to see the darkness in them both because she was so young. Maybe she _couldn't_ see the darkness in him, the lurking evil, the horror, because she had never lived that herself. She had known love and acceptance throughout her life, and the only shadow of grief, the death of her mother, had come from sickness, not murder.

And Thomas loved her for it.

He loved how her face was an open book for him to read. He loved how enthusiastic she was, how she seemed to love his inventions, and how she shared his drive to push ever forward, to always strive for progress and innovation; to look towards the future.

He remembered the first moment that he knew he was falling for her; the dance. "I like to keep my eyes closed to things that make me uncomfortable," he told her, aware that he was causing all sorts of social turmoil from choosing Edith over Eunice McMichael, and refusing to think about it.

"Close your eyes," Lucille had told him, every time she had been beaten in his place. Their mother had hit her so hard with the hand that bore her ring, that Lucille still bore the scares on her face from the blows. "Close your eyes," she had whispered to him, "This isn't your fault. I love you, Thomas, do you hear me? This isn't your fault."

He had closed his eyes, and she had held him afterwards, her back and face and arms covered in cuts and bruises.

"I don't want to close my eyes," Edith confided to him, seeming surprised at his declaration. Her brown eyes were warm and bright and filled with light. "I want to keep my eyes open."

When she danced with him, they moved as one. He pulled and she followed effortlessly, seeming to know what was in his mind before he had time to realize it himself. He felt as if he were flying, as if Edith were flying with him, and they could go anywhere, be anything, they wanted. The world was theirs. The candle in their joined hands never once went out and, staring at her bright, happy face, Thomas knew that they were joined, that some part of his soul now belonged to her.

Lucille didn't like her; Thomas could see that from the first.

Lucille's beautiful, cold face turned even colder when she watched them. She was polite but distant, and passive-aggressively hostile, although Thomas was not sure that Edith saw that. She seemed to want to connect with his sister, and that made him hope; hope that Lucille would connect back.

Sometimes he saw Edith's face when Lucille touched him at night, or when he ran his hands over her pale breasts. He wondered if Edith would respond with thrown back head, and fluttering eyes, or if she would keep her eyes open and watch his face in return.

He wondered if they would make a child, a child such as he and Lucille had, and if that child would live unlike their poor, poor boy. Thomas had named him Luke, after his sister, but Lucille had refused to name a baby who she said would die; he was such a sickly little thing.

He wondered if Lucille would let him keep this wife; and not kill her like all the others.

Edith, standing outside their hotel room, with tears in her eyes, and a face that lit up like morning sunrise when she saw him. He had to kiss her then, just a brush of his lips. He had never truly kissed any other woman but Lucille; he had never wanted too. His wives he had kissed perfunctorily, but there had been no passion there, and it had been dry and lifeless and far too much like kissing family.

And he was well-aware of the irony in that, thank you very much.

But Edith, one touch of her lips, soft and sweet and gentle, and he couldn't help but lean in. She was so small and she fit perfectly in his arms, and then she kissed him back, and he kissed her again and again and again, wanting, needing, every drop of her. She made him believe that anything was possible, that he could leave his dark past behind and start over and be better, with her by his side.

He came from Lucille's hands with Edith's golden hair in his eyes, and he fell to ecstasy as Edith took him for the first time to the sound of Lucille's lullaby in his ears.

He loved them both, the light and the dark, the innocent and the strong, the new and the old. It would kill him, he realized; he could not have both. The world would not let him. But the world would not let him have either one of them as well; it would deny him his sister, if it knew, and had tried to deny him Edith before Lucille had stepped in.

So Thomas, surrounded by the old, decaying house filled with ghosts, and his inventions, and the two women he loved more than anything, just hoped that it would be enough. He hoped that these few days, these few weeks, would be enough.

That somehow he could make this work, somehow he could save them all, somehow the blood of Crimson Peak wouldn't catch up to him, to them, not this time.

He closed his eyes, and held on tight.

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What do you think? Seriously, go see this movie. It's like a mixture of Pride and Prejudice, and Flowers in the Attic, and Game of Thrones (with the Lannister incest and all the death), and The Woman in Black, all in one movie.


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